


What was never there

by CGAdam



Category: No Fandom
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Loyalty, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-06
Updated: 2015-02-06
Packaged: 2018-03-10 19:05:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3300356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CGAdam/pseuds/CGAdam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>NOT a sad story, promise. A hard question to answer prompts a look back at life and friendship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What was never there

“Well? I'm waiting.”

“Hang on a minute, I'm still thinking.” I drummed my fingers on the tabletop, pondering the question.

Sally had been born with congenital insensitivity to pain. It hadn't been easy for her growing up. She'd never developed all the normal danger instincts people build up after they'd been injured by something. Pain avoidance makes up a huge part of our lives, whether we realize it or not. Slam your finger in a car door, and you'll be sure to watch where your hand goes next time.

Sally couldn't learn that way.

The first time I'd met her was when we were seven, and she was gushing blood from a head wound. She'd jumped off the playground slide, landed badly, cracked her head on the pavement, then gotten up and started dancing around on the jungle gym.

_I_ freaked out. Blood terrifies me. I ran and tried to find a teacher, but for whatever reason, there just wasn't one around. So I grabbed Sally's arm and hauled her down to the nurse's office, her complaining about missing recess the entire way.

That girl can hold a grudge, by the way. The next day in class, she deliberately sliced her hand on a pair of scissors and wiped the blood on my arm. I freaked out, again, she laughed her butt off, the teacher came over to see what was going on, and the next thing I knew, _I_ was somehow getting in trouble for Sally's four stitches across her palm.

I didn't find out until years later she'd been grounded for a month for that little stunt. Didn't stop her, though.

She kept doing things like that- cutting herself so she could chase me with a bleeding finger, threatening to put her hand in boiling water so I'd tackle her and knock her away from it, dropping heavier and heavier rocks on her foot until I snatched the biggest one away and shouted at her to stop it. She _loved_ tormenting me like that.

Second grade was kinda hell for me.

Halfway through summer vacation that year was when things changed. I was in the park, sitting in a tree branch and flying my dad's remote airplane. My dad had asked me to control it for him while he went to use the bathroom.

I was thrilled beyond words- this was his baby, a kit airplane he'd built practically from nothing all year long. I could hardly believe he was trusting me to keep it flying for him, even for a few minutes. I wasn't paying attention to anything around me, just that little speck of color up in the sky.

Somebody screamed.

I'm not sure where the dog came from. Maybe it was a stray, maybe it was some escaped lab animal. All that mattered was there was a big, angry, foaming-at-the-mouth dog rushing around the park, snapping and snarling at everything, chasing people up trees, into cars, wherever they could find shelter from its teeth.

All except Sally, of course.

She looked right at me, sitting in the tree. She looked at the dog terrorizing every living soul in the park. And I could _see_ it, that little light bulb going off, the sign in her mind saying, “This will be the best prank I've ever pulled!”

She ran at the dog, and the dog ran right at her.

I have no idea how I reacted so fast, or if I even really comprehended what I was doing. In the end, it doesn't matter. I managed to crash my dad's prized, eight hundred dollar remote controlled airplane into the dog before it got to Sally.

I still have nightmares about what the propeller did to that thing.

My dad came barreling out of the bathroom two seconds later. He took one look at the...mess... in the middle of the park, snatched me out the tree and crushed me to him in the biggest hug I think he'd ever given me. I thought I was going to get the life beat out of me, but he never said a single word about me wrecking the plane. Turns out he caught the tail end of it through the bathroom window. He knew why I'd done it.

Sally stopped tormenting me, obviously. Not because she realized I'd saved her life. Oh, no, that would be too normal for my crazy little friend. She stopped tormenting me because her dad said _my_ dad was going to lock me in a snowglobe until I turned twenty for crashing his airplane, and that the only way he wouldn't do it was if Sally promised she'd be my friend instead of my torturer.

Her dad's a little weird, too.

Anyway, it worked. Third grade started, and she was nice and polite and friendly with me. She tried messing with some of the other kids the same way she'd messed with me, but when I asked her to stop, she did. We had a pretty good year, and it went uneventfully.

Fourth grade started off pretty bad. We'd transferred up to a bigger school, and that brought in a whole group of new kids that didn't know she couldn't feel pain. When some of them found out, they started bugging her about it. All that stuff she'd done to herself to tease me, now they were trying to do it to _her_. They'd poke her with pencils, scissors, anything to try and get a reaction. A few of the nastier ones made a game out of it- 'how hard can we stab the freak with a pin before she notices.'

The first time I saw them doing it, I told them to stop. The second time, I had to get a teacher.

The third time, I smashed the biggest one in the face with my heaviest textbook and broke his nose. The nightmares weren't as bad this time. Just stuff about bloody boogers. I could handle it.

I sat in the principal's office for about an hour while my parents and Sally's parents talked to the administrators. Sally was with me, since she was indirectly the reason the whole fight started. We didn't say much. She was embarrassed to be the focus of something like this, I was too mad and scared to say anything.

Well, that's mostly true. I did say one thing, right after Sally said something to me.

“Thank you.”

“I'd do it again.”

I never had to, though. Sally and I transferred to a different class, and we looked out for each other. We never told anyone she couldn't feel pain, and I did my best to help her fake it. We had all kinds of code worked out- I'd cough or say some random word, and that was her cue to say 'ouch' or flinch or whatever.

School went on and the years went by. There were little slip ups here and there, but mostly, she figured out how to mask her oddity until it didn't matter anymore. Once we hit high school, there were lots of other things to focus on. The 'no-pain' thing, if it ever came up at all, mostly got tossed around for curiosity's sake for a while, then quietly dropped. There was all the drama of boys and girls and school sports and on and on forever.

In all those years, she'd never really asked me to describe pain. I think she'd tried with her parents at one point, but somehow, she never asked _me._ Maybe it was a holdover from when we were kids and the whole tormentor thing. But today, as we were sitting in the coffee shop doing homework, she finally did.

She was staring at me, still waiting for a response, and I was still stumped. How do you describe the feeling of damage to someone that can't feel it? How can you explain what it feels like to have a part of you twisted or ripped or cut? It'd be like telling a one-armed person to reach for something with their missing limb. They can't move something that isn't there. A colorblind person can't miss the red of a rose, because they've never seen it. Someone born deaf won't miss the sound of music, because to them, it's not something they ever-

Oh.

I looked into her eyes. “Imagine our lives without each other.”

She got it. I almost wish she hadn’t. The look in her eyes gave me a new set of nightmares. Fortunately, Sally is right at my side when they wake me up.

* * *

 

[A random work from a writing prompt on Reddit. Thanks for reading!]


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